President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s recent return to Yemen has been met by continued massive, violent protests calling for his immediate ouster. With separatists and al-Qaeda insurgents continuing to gain ground, the total collapse of Yemen’s government looks to be nearly at hand.

Saleh had spent the past three months in Saudi Arabia recuperating from burns he received in a June rocket attack on his presidential compound, an attack which killed 16 people and wounded more than 100. While waiting for Saleh to return, his sons and relatives were charged with maintaining control over Yemen’s government, its armed forces and the capital city of Sanaa.

However, their heavy handed attempts to maintain order have only served to expedite Yemen’s descent into a state of near anarchy. In the past two weeks alone, savage street fighting has claimed over 150 lives as Republic of Yemen Government (ROYG) forces have rained mortars and anti-aircraft fire onto crowds of anti-government protesters.

In the meantime, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and other Yemeni Islamic militants, such as the Partisans of Sharia, have overtaken several towns in southern Yemen, including the Abyan province capital of Zinjibar. Moreover, senior AQAP leaders have now admitted that fighters from Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al Shabab had crossed over into Yemen and were now joined in the insurgency.

Then, days before Saleh was to return home, anti-government tribesmen overran an army base north of Sanaa, home to the Republican Guard under the command of Saleh’s oldest son, Ahmed. That attack had been preceded a week earlier when another Republican Guard base in Sanaa had been taken over by a group of protesters and renegade ROYG soldiers.

Finally, serving as a backdrop to all this upheaval has been a Yemen economy, saddled with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, which has all but collapsed. So, it wasn’t too surprising that the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently wrote that the ROYG has “appeared to have lost effective control of parts of the country and within the major cities.”

So, it was into this quagmire to which Saleh returned, hoping to stave off further unrest and perhaps spare him a stint in prison or a date in front of a firing squad. To that end, Saleh, who has repeatedly rejected calls by opposition groups to vacate his 30-year presidency, offered in a televised national address to abide by a deal brokered by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Under that deal, Sahel would allow for parliamentary and presidential elections. In return, Saleh would cede power within a month of signing the accord in exchange for immunity from prosecution by a newly elected Yemen government.

Unfortunately for Saleh, the deal he offered had already been rejected three times by Yemen’s main opposition group, the Joint Meetings Parties. So, if Saleh had entertained thoughts that his televised peace offering would have a pacifying effect, ensuing events quickly disabused him of the notion.

Specifically, tens of thousands of protesters, quickly poured onto the streets of Sanaa demanding his immediate arrest, convinced Saleh was only stalling for time in an attempt to further consolidate his power. Perhaps their suspicions of Saleh being less than candid about voluntarily stepping aside was fueled by RYOG forces only one day after Saleh’s arrival having attacked an opposition camp in Sanaa, killing 17 people in the process.

The United Nations Security Council has reverted to its usual modus operandi: inaction. On April 27th, after receiving a detailed report by the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs, Lynn Pascoe, on the violence unleashed by the Syrian government against its own people, the council members were unable to agree on a simple press statement calling on the Syrian government to stop its brutality.

In his briefing to the Security Council, Pascoe noted that the anti-government demonstrations in Syria had started in mid-March, following the detention of fifteen schoolchildren in Deraa for anti-government graffiti, and gradually increased in geographic scope and participation.  The protests began with demands for greater freedom and political and economic reforms and eventually included calls for the regime’s downfall.  The Syrian authorities had reacted with a mix of ‘reform’ gestures, and increasingly violent repression. Despite the promise of reform, the government crackdown had dramatically intensified, Pascoe reported.  As a result, more than 100 persons were killed across the country from Friday April 22nd to Sunday April 24th alone, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Pascoe went on to say that the overwhelming majority of protests had been peaceful, but there were also credible reports of a very few instances where protesters had used force, resulting in some deaths of security forces.  Despite the Syrian government’s attempt to place the blame for the violence entirely on the protesters’ shoulders, however, Pascoe said there were no reports suggesting that violence from the protester side was a recurring phenomenon.

The Security Council members listened to Pascoe, but the result was pre-ordained. Under Security Council rules, all fifteen members must approve in order for a press statement to be issued in the name of the council. In this case, Lebanon refused to go along with any press release for fear of offending Syria.

While Russia and China expressed caution in light of the interventions in Libya and the Ivory Coast under Security Council auspices that they believed went too far, Security Council sources have told UN reporters that Russia and China were at least willing to negotiate the wording of a press statement. However, the Lebanese UN ambassador reportedly had instructions from his government not to agree to any Security Council press statement, knowing that the unanimity rule would protect Syria from any official Security Council criticism.

In what is viewed as a victory for Governor Scott Walker and his attempt to limit the power of government unions, it appears incumbent David Prosser has defeated challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg in the race for a seat on Wisconsin’s state supreme court. Angry state Democrats fought vigorously to turn the supreme court race into a referendum on Walker’s legislative maneuvers, but their efforts now appear to be a lost cause. More importantly, Prosser’s victory will preserve the conservative tilt of Wisconsin’s supreme court, paving the way for the controversial union legislation, currently facing legal challenges, to be enacted into law.

Judge Prosser’s margin of victory was 7,316 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast, which provides Ms. Kloppenburg the right to challenge the results, as state law allows for such if a candidate’s margin of victory is less .5 percent of the vote. Mr. Prosser’s edge was 0.488 percent. The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) won’t certify the results until a recount is completed, or Ms. Kloppenburg declines the opportunity to have one conducted. She has until April 20th at 5 pm to make up her mind.

Last Monday, Prosser declared himself the winner. “A funny thing happened to me on the way to my concession speech,” he said. “The people of Wisconsin told me to tear it up, and go back to work.” The concession to which Mr. Prosser was referring involved the victory speech given by Ms. Kloppenburg the day after the election, when it was initially reported that she had prevailed by 204 votes. “You know the numbers show that we won, and we are gratified to have that victory in hand,” said Ms. Kloppenburg at the time. Those tallies, however, were unofficial, and it was the official vote that defeated Ms. Kloppenburg. Because of the substantial difference in the current totals, Mr. Prosser made it clear he considered a recount unnecessary. “Admittedly the election was uncomfortably close,” Prosser said. “My opponent ran a very effective campaign. But now that all 72 counties have completed their canvasses, the result of the election is not in doubt.”

Prosser campaign advisor Brian Schimming was even more direct: “We don’t feel that there is a need for a recount,” he said. “The largest number of votes–statewide–that’s ever been turned around is 489 votes, and we are now at 7,316? So we really don’t see the need for a recount right now. It would be enormously costly, and there’s just no evidence there to suggest that a recount’s needed.” Melissa Mulliken, Kloppenburg’s campaign manger, refused to reveal her candidate’s intentions. “State statute clearly contemplates recounts when the margin is less than one-half of 1 percent, as it is in this case,” she said.

The vote turnaround occurred when Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus reported on April 7th that, in her initial count, she had omitted 14,315 votes from the city of Brookfield which she had failed to save on her computer. The GAB investigated, but Democrats demanded an expansion of that investigation, citing a 2006 attorney general race in which the results showed 174,047 votes, but only 156,804 ballots cast. Yet Kevin Kennedy, director of the GAB, while conceding that there was “negligence in the way things were handled on Election night,” reported that the board hasn’t found any evidence of vote fraud. Mr. Kennedy added that they were already looking into 2006, explaining that the vote discrepancy then was the difference between votes scanned by Wisconsin’s voting machines and those that were hand counted. Less widely reported about the current election was a correction in the county of Milwaukee, where 409 votes were added for Prosser and 398 for Kloppenburg, a net gain of 11 votes for Prosser. That discrepancy was due to the fact that two wards on Milwaukee’s south side had reported totals for absentee votes only.

As most Americans know, this race was the latest chance for Wisconsin voters to weigh in on that state’s attempt, led by Governor Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature, to restrict the collective bargaining power of the state’s government unions solely to wages, and eliminate mandatory dues collection. That effort led to weeks of protests, the flight of 14 Democrat legislators from the state in order to prevent a vote on the issue, a torrent of hate mail and death threats directed a Republic state legislators, as well as a disturbing letter sent to a local businessman by union members demanding he rescind his support of Governor Walker or face a boycott.

Unsurprisingly, as reported by the Brennan Center for Justice, a record amount of spending on television ad campaigns was underwritten by “special interest groups” whose focus was largely centered on negative and attack ad campaigning. The center also notes that only Pennsylvania has spent more on state supreme court elections between 2007-2011.

It’s more than interesting that while there have been over 470,000 views of the exchange between David Horowitz and the Muslim Students Association officer at UC San Diego which revealed an appalling support for a genocide of the Jews, and it has been featured on many, many websites as chilling evidence of the jihadists among us, not a single “liberal” website has posted it, including Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. And while Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have both played the video, not a single “liberal” cable news show has mentioned it. Not Keith Olbermann, not Rachel Maddow, and not Chris Matthews who are too busy skewering inept Republican candidates who want to argue the fine points of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-5. Not Anderson Cooper nor Larry King. Nor is this just a passive denial of the jihadist threat at home.

Joshua Micah Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo went out of his way three years ago to attack Horowitz when he spoke at Columbia about the oppression of women in Islam as part of the first Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Islamo-Fascism was evidently a problem less pressing than the threat posed by Horowitz’s attempt to raise campus awareness of the widespread campus support for Islamo-Fascism. Although Islamo-Fascism Awareness week was supported by conservative students on 100 campuses — a fact noteworthy in itself – not a single article appeared on liberal/left websites to engage the issues that it raised. Instead, the event was greeted with ridicule and smears in a concerted attempt by the Left to discredit and dismiss it, and not incidentally lend support to the jihadist forces at home and abroad.

Recently Horowitz emailed Marshall expressing curiosity about his intentions, and specifically an interest should he be planning another effort around the San Diego incident to ridicule the idea that it might indicate a serious problem with which all Americans should be concerned. Marshall responded in high dudgeon at the thought that anyone might suspect the center-left of not taking the jihadist threat seriously. So Horowitz asked him for evidence of his own website’s concern. Marshall retorted the very idea that there was not such concern was preposterous, then ended the exchange.

This is the headline at the lead story from May 28 at Talking Points Memo, Marshall’s journal and one of the leading online publications of the center-left:

Planned Muslim Cultural Center Near Ground Zero Prompts Massive Right-Wing Freakout

The  article then goes on to defend the construction of a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero and infer that its opponents (like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer) are racist Islamophobes. Cover is given to the project’s leader Feisal Abdul Rauf who is cast as a moderate antidote to Al Qaeda:

The effort is being spearheaded by a longtime local imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has said the center would “bridge and heal a divide” and has said it’s his mission to fight radicalism.

But this is a fantasy. At Pajamas Media Walid Shoebat revealed that the reality is that Rauf actually does not believe in inter-faith dialogue, supports Shariah law, and argues that America brought 9/11 on itself.

But perhaps this is an anomaly among Talking Points Memo’s coverage of the war with genocidal, Islamic fascists. With the events of last week – the attempt by Hamas’ “humanitarian wing” to break the legal blockade which keeps rockets from killing Israeli children – the ultimate test of TPM’s allegiances was presented.

At TPM Café on June 1:

Here is a better analogy from the civil rights era, offered by a young friend and colleague.

“Israel’s defenders,” he says, “are arguing that Israel had the right to attack the people on the ships because the flotillas’ goal was not really to supply the Gazans but to break the blockade. Supplying the Gazans was only a pretense for their larger political goal.

He continues:

“So does that mean it was okay to beat and brutalize kids who were sitting-in at Woolworth counters throughout the south in the 1950’s and 1960’s because their real goal was not being served lunch but ending segregation.”

Perfect.

In other words: the flotilla Nazis seeking to break a naval blockade for a terrorist army whose official goal is the “obliteration” of the Jewish state are akin to Civil Rights activists fighting against racist policies.

TPM Café on June 2:

The bottom line is that the men and women of the flotilla had every right to attempt to destroy an illegal blockade that Israel had no legal standing to impose and which was designed to inflict collective punishment on the people of Gaza. (There is no truth to the story that Israel would have delivered the goods on the ships to Gaza if asked; the Israelis never made that offer and, judging by years of precedent, would have blocked any delivery).

As for the Israeli argument that its soldiers were attacked, that is ridiculous. Israeli commandos were ordered to board a civilian ship in international waters and the government that sent them claims that the resisting passengers attacked them without provocation. This is like a carjacker complaining to the police that the driver bashed him with a crowbar that was under the seat. Neither carjackers nor hijackers should expect their victims to acquiesce peacefully.

In other words: Israel is a criminal state. The IDF was attacked because of the “illegal action” it engaged in.

Continue reading on page 2 here.

The National Security Strategy (NSS) released by the Barack Obama administration on May 27 is not so much a look forward as a look back. It is an attempt to return to the optimistic days following the end of the Cold War when it seemed a peaceful new world order was possible. In 1999, President Bill Clinton claimed “perhaps for the first time in history, the world’s leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory. The world clearly is coming together.” President Obama says essentially the same thing in the opening paragraph of his cover letter to the NSS when he notes that “globalization”—the buzz word of the post-Cold War era — has “made peace possible among the major powers.” The dangers that remain are of a different sort, “from international terrorism and the spread of deadly technologies, to economic upheaval and a changing climate.”

That the world looked like the classical liberal model expounded by Clinton in 1999 was doubtful even then. A decade later, the cracks are even larger. Five months before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, a Chinese fighter rammed a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea, an area Beijing has been trying to claim as sovereign territory. The rise of China and the emergence of other ambitious powers herald not a new world but a new cycle in the old world of international rivalry. The NSS explicitly rejects the “world as it is” in its attempt to fashion “the world we seek.” But the NSS does not lay out a path between worlds; it simply assumes the new world already exists.

There are still a few odds and ends to be cleaned up from the Bush administration, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSS pledges “a focus on defeating al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the globe” but sees no real dangers after that which would require a military effort. Though the NSS identifies the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and biological) as problems, the two most menacing rogue states, North Korea and Iran, are to be dealt with through diplomacy. As the NSS states on page 23, “If North Korea eliminates its nuclear weapons program, and Iran meets its international obligations on its nuclear program, they will be able to proceed on a path to greater political and economic integration with the international community. If they ignore their international obligations, we will pursue multiple means to increase their isolation and bring them into compliance with international nonproliferation norms.” This is at best a containment policy.

But how can Pyongyang or Tehran be contained, let alone “isolated” when they have friends among the other major powers? The NSS depends on there being a consensus among the powers on issues like non-proliferation within a general spirit of cooperation. That is not how world politics is evolving.

According to the NSS, “The European Union has deepened its integration. Russia has reemerged in the international arena as a strong voice. China and India—the world’s two most populous nations—are becoming more engaged globally. From Latin America to Africa to the Pacific, new and emerging powers hold out opportunities for partnership, even as a handful of states endanger regional and global security by flouting international norms.” Under the Obama policy, “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia—so that we can cooperate on issues of bilateral and global concern, with the recognition that power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.”

The integration of the EU is being called into question by the sovereign debt crisis that has ripped through Greece and has threatened to spread to Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. The single euro currency, once thought to be an alternative to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, is in free fall. Euro skeptics in England, France, Holland and Germany are balking at “saving” the Mediterranean and Eastern members of the bloc.

The NSS singles out Brazil for special praise saying, “We welcome Brazil’s leadership and seek to move beyond dated North-South divisions to pursue progress on bilateral, hemispheric, and global issues.” Yet, Brazil just brokered a deal with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program meant to shield it from a new round of UN sanctions being pushed by the U.S. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had told President Obama personally at the Nuclear Security Summit that he would not back additional sanctions on Iran, and repeated this stance when meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Brasilia immediately after the two leaders left Washington. The Hu-Lula meeting took place within the larger context of a BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) summit where the emerging powers coordinate policies formulated primarily against the positions of the United States and EU.

South Africa joins the mix in BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), a coalition at the UN that opposes the American and European demand for mandated limits on green house gas emissions to fight alleged global warming. Supported by Russia and the group of 77 developing nations, BASIC represents the world’s rejection of President Obama’s obsession about climate change that appears repeatedly in the NSS as a priority global threat.

The core value of BASIC and its allies is unrestricted economic growth, which means intensified competition in domestic and world markets. For some time, American officials have made it clear that unless China, India and Brazil provide substantial market access to U.S. exports commensurate with their high economic growth rates, there can be no conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks. These negotiations have been stalled virtually from their inception in 2001 due to a fundamental clash of national interests.

The Obama administration has hailed China and Russia for supporting a draft sanctions proposal against Iran at the UN. Yet, Beijing and Moscow watered down the resolution to prevent it from crippling the Tehran regime. Most importantly, Russia and China will be allowed to continue investing in Iran’s energy sector, which will boost the country’s revenues which the mullah’s use to finance their aggressive foreign policy as well as nuclear development. To improve relations, the Obama administration dropped sanctions against Moscow’s state arms export agency and three Russian entities previously found to have transferred technology or weapons to Iran. The UN sanctions proposal would also allow the Russians to sell S-300 air defense missiles (which have an anti-missile capability) to Tehran. So even if the UN Security Council adopts the resolution, it will not “isolate” Iran from its main international backers.

Nor is international rivalry confined to economics and rogue states. China’s massive military modernization program, led by new weapon systems designed to attack U.S. and allied forces across Asia, is not mentioned in the NSS. To do so would have undermined the fanciful vision of a peaceful, cooperative world. It would also have called into question why the Obama Pentagon is cutting back on the high-end conventional forces, from armored units and air superiority fighters to missile defense and naval shipbuilding, that would be needed to not only counter rising “peer” competitors like China but to defeat major regional powers like North Korea and Iran.

The NSS attempts to conjure up a world in which an NSS is not needed, but the Obama administration does not have the power to change the true, dangerous nature of global politics. What the NSS reveals is the unwillingness of President Obama to deal with the world as it is. Thus, America will remain vulnerable, as its leaders are continually blindsided by the strategies of adversaries they cannot bring themselves to think about.

"So it is made out, George Bush-style, that you are either for freedom of expression or against it!" Yep.

"Zapiro: Drawing the Line: Zubair Bayat," from Dispatch Online, May 29:

[...] Two things are wrong with Zapiro's cartoon. Firstly, any attempt to depict him in illustration is an attempt to depict the sacrosanct, which is not allowed. Secondly, the nature of cartoons is to satirise and trivialise. This is clearly not acceptable in the case of a personality who is held in the highest esteem by over a billion people globally.

In this particular cartoon, the insinuation is that the Holy Prophet (pbuh) is in need of psychiatric help, an idea which prejudiced and hostile Orientalists have always attempted to project in their works. This dimension of the cartoon adds insult to injury and serves to rub the proverbial salt deeper into the wound.

When Muslims object, the stock response is that they do not appreciate freedom of expression. The media and others view this as an infringement of the right of freedom of speech. So it is made out, George Bush-style, that you are either for freedom of expression or against it! However, one aspect often overlooked is that no right is absolute; there are inherent limitations. Every right is counterbalanced against other rights. Every right comes with responsibility. And responsibility was certainly not displayed by the publishers of this cartoon.

But who decides what is "responsible" free speech and what isn't? That person is the one who holds all the power that matters. To set up such an arbiter is to embark upon the road to tyranny.

Irrespective of the motive for publishing the cartoon - whether it was a cheap publicity stunt, a gimmick to boost waning sales, deliberate provocation, or sheer ignorance - it was grossly offensive and highly insensitive. The worldwide anger and protests following the publication of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet (pbuh) made it amply clear that Muslims would not accept his depiction as a caricature or a cartoon figure.

Note the veiled threat: he is saying that Motoons should not be published because Muslims will react with the violent irrationality that greeted the publication of the first Motoons (after the OIC stirred the pot, that is).

The media have a duty to act responsibly in respect of sensitive issues and not to push the right to freedom of expression to ridiculous levels, where the lines of distinction between the profound and the profane are virtually obliterated. Sensible leaders around the world, including the Pope, issued strong statements condemning the inflammatory Danish cartoons when they appeared.

A spokesman for the US state department, Kurtis Cooper, was equally strong in his condemnation: "These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims. We all fully recognise and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable."

It is important to remember that when Kurtis Cooper talks about "inciting religious or ethnic hatreds," he is talking about cartoons. In a world with an ounce of sanity left, he would be explaining how the freedom of speech is an essential safeguard against authoritarian government, and calling upon the Islamic world to show some maturity and restraint, and not kill innocents or issue violent threats, or, for that matter, attempt to impose its laws and mores upon the free West, over some drawings.

Muslims, for their part, accept the principle of wholesome and constructive freedom of expression, but not the freedom to wantonly insult, which is sometimes deviously and deceptively masqueraded as freedom of expression. True freedom of expression is freedom from insult, not freedom to insult. Freedom to insult has ultimately resulted in hatred, bigotry and even destruction. Studies indicate that reckless use (or rather abuse) of freedom of expression contributed to a great extent to the genocide in Rwanda, as an example, leaving over a million dead.

Who decides what is insulting and what isn't? I'm insulted by Islamic supremacist attempts to restrict free speech. Why is my feeling of insult worth less than a Muslim's?

Muslim outrage is often simplistically misconstrued as a lack of humour and over- sensitivity....

Yep.

In a far-too-late attempt to shore up his conservative base ahead of the 2006 massacre, President Bush sent 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, but placed major limits on what they could do. Now, with the immigration debate hot again because of the Arizona bill, President Obama is making a similar move and is sending 1,200 National Guard troops.

Even The Associated Press is reporting on the similarities:

“The 6,000 troops who were sent by President George W. Bush to the border from June 2006 to July 2008 were generally credited within law enforcement circles as having helped improve border security, but restrictions placed on the soldiers were denounced by advocates for tougher enforcement who are now leveling similar objections at Obama’s plan.

Some law enforcement officials along the border said they worry that Obama will repeat Bush’s mistake by limiting the troops to support roles, such as conducting surveillance and installing lighting, rather than letting them make arrests and confront smugglers.”

The very name of the National Guard proves that this is a task that they should be performing if Customs and Border Protection is unable. In a post-9/11 world, it is simply unthinkable that the border would be left open as it currently is—well, I guess it’s unthinkable until you think of the GOP’s need to win Hispanic votes. With the minority vote growing so quickly, and the Caucasian vote divided between the two parties, the GOP’s survival actually depends upon making progress among Hispanics.

It’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation for GOP politicians. If they do nothing, as Bush did, the conservative base will justifiably scream at them. If they do something, they contribute to a loss of support among Hispanics that not only threatens their careers, but the fate of their party. Man, I love not being a politician!

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do.

At the root of this stance is a desperate attempt to have it both ways, to reconcile Islam's teachings and the actions that stem from it with the religion's claims to be just, compassionate, and peaceful. Or at the very least, it is an attempt to convince non-Muslims that the two can indeed be reconciled, and that to believe otherwise is to be bigoted and hateful. In other words, it is emotional, political blackmail.

More on this story. "Fears of Muslim backlash amid cartoon row," by Phumza Macanda for Reuters, May 21:

A South African weekly on Friday published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad complaining that his followers lack a sense of humour, angering Muslims and raising fear of reprisal attacks during next month's World Cup.

Whose prophet?

South Africa will host the month-long soccer tournament from June 11 and police have pledged to protect the 300 000 expected foreign visitors and the teams taking part.

The Mail & Guardian newspaper published a sketch by renowned South African cartoonist Zapiro after a court rejected an overnight bid by Muslim advocacy groups for an injunction to prevent the newspaper from printing the cartoon.

The cartoon depicts the prophet on a psychologist's couch saying that his followers do not have a sense of humour.

Muslims consider any depiction of the founder of Islam to be offensive. In 2005, a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad which were subsequently republished elsewhere, sparking violent protests that killed several dozen people.

South Africa's Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) said it would meet to discuss the cartoon, which it deemed highly offensive to the religious sensibilities of Muslims.

"It seems to be provocative in many ways on the very eve of the World Cup in South Africa, when we need peaceful co-existence and co-operation amongst religious communities in South Africa," said MJC President Ihsaan Hendricks.

"The M&G (Mail & Guardian) needed to understand that offending the South African Muslim community is offending the international Muslim community," he added....

And your point is...?

WASHINGTON -- A senior U.S. military official says Pakistan now has at least two men in custody on suspicion of helping to finance the Times Square bombing attempt.

The investigation into the May 1 attempt has widened as authorities in the U.S. and Pakistan follow the money trail.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press to discuss the sensitive issue of Pakistani cooperation in the probe....

Sensitive indeed.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Obama administration has delivered new and stiff warnings to Pakistan after the failed Times Square car bombing that it must urgently move against the nexus of Islamic militancy in the country's lawless tribal regions, American and Pakistani officials said.

The American military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, met with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, at his headquarters here on Friday and urged Pakistan to move more quickly in beginning a military offensive against the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda in North Waziristan, Americans and Pakistanis familiar with the visit said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of continuing diplomatic efforts here.

The Pakistani-American man who admitted to the Times Square attack, Faisal Shahzad, 30, told American investigators that he had received training in North Waziristan, the main base for the Pakistani Taliban, Al Qaeda and other militant groups.

The new pressure from Washington was characterized by both the Pakistani and American officials as a sharp turnaround from the relatively polite encouragement adopted by the Obama administration in recent months. And it comes amid increasing debate within the administration about how to expand the American military's influence -- and even a boots-on-the-ground presence -- on Pakistani soil.

Though the bombing in Times Square failed, Mr. Shahzad's ability to move back and forth between the United States and Pakistan has heightened fears in the Obama administration that another attempt at a terrorist attack could succeed.

"We are saying, 'Sorry, if there is a successful attack, we will have to act' " within Pakistan, one of the American officials said.

That issue has been a source of growing tension between the countries. Pakistani officials, already alarmed by the increase in American drone aircraft attacks against militants in northwestern Pakistan, have been extremely sensitive about any hint that American ground troops could become involved in the fight. And attempts by the United States to increase the presence of Special Operations forces there even in an advisory or training role have been met with great resistance by the Pakistanis.

The Pakistani military has stepped up its campaigns against militants in the past year, including an offensive in South Waziristan that has been praised by American officials. It has said that it is preparing to take up the fight against militants in North Waziristan. But Pakistani officials have insisted that the expanded campaign will happen completely on their own terms, and they have warned the Obama administration not to push so hard that it uses up the good will it has tried to foster here.

But the Americans' urgency has been increasing on multiple fronts. With an intensified American military campaign raging against the Taliban next door in Afghanistan, and now with the renewed evidence of Pakistani sources for plots to attack on American soil, it was clear the Pakistani government had to do more, and more urgently, a senior American official said Saturday.

General Kayani, with whom General McChrystal has forged a positive relationship, was essentially told, " 'You can't pretend any longer that this is not going on,' " another American official said. " 'We are saying you have got to go into North Waziristan.'"...

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani police arrested several people on Tuesday in connection with the failed Times Square car bomb attack in New York, security sources said.

"We have picked up a few family members" related to Faisal Shahzad, the chief suspect in the attempted attack, a security official in Karachi said. A friend of Shahzad was also arrested.

Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American, was arrested late on Monday at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York after being removed from a plane as it was about take off for Dubai, U.S. officials said.

Another intelligence official in Pakistan said Shahzad received militant training in northwest Pakistan near the garrison town of Kohat. The area around Kohat is a stronghold of Tariq Afridi, the Pakistani Taliban commander in the region....

Federal authorities are closing in on the man they say is a person of interest in the Times Square car bomb attempt this weekend, who is described as a naturalized American citizen who hails from Pakistan and just returned after spending five months there.

There is growing evidence the bomber did not act alone and had ties to radical elements overseas, with one senior official telling ABC News there are several individuals believed to be connected with the bombing and that at least one of them is a Pakistani-American.

Attorney General Eric Holder said today the investigators had made "substantial progress" in tracking the man who drove a Nissan Pathfinder into New York's Times Square with a crude bomb that failed to detonate.

Officials declined to provide the specifics that led them to believe there were overseas links to a larger plot.

Authorities said another clue in the investigation is a video posted online early Sunday morning by persons in Connecticut, who may have been involved in the bomb attempt and are being sought by law enforcement. The video, posted on a site registered one day before the attack, has the Taliban in Pakistan claiming responsibility for the attempted bombing....

The failed car bombing in Times Square increasingly appears to have been coordinated by several people in a plot with international links, Obama administration officials said Tuesday.

The disclosure, while tentative, came as the White House intensified its focus on the Saturday incident in New York City, in which explosives inside a Nissan Pathfinder were set ablaze but failed to detonate at the tourist-crowded corner of Broadway and 45th Street.

Emerging from a series of briefings, several officials said it was premature to rule out any motive but said the sweeping, multi-state investigation was turning up new clues.

Separately, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs also characterized the incident for the first time as an attempted act of terrorism. "I would say that was intended to terrorize, and I would say that whomever did that would be categorized as a terrorist," Gibbs said, sharpening the administration's tone.

Another U.S. official, recounting a conversation with intelligence officials, said, "Don't be surprised if you find a foreign nexus. . . . They're looking at some tell-tale signs and they're saying it's pointing in that direction."

Officials cautioned that even if the investigation points toward an international link, rather than domestic or anti-government groups, that does not mean al-Qaeda or another terrorist organization is necessarily involved.

The emerging picture came as police and federal investigators searched for a man in his 40s whom surveillance cameras caught changing his shirt in an alley and looking over his shoulder near where the car was parked about 6:30 p.m., and another person seen running north on Broadway from the area. New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly also said detectives had spoken with the registered owner of the car but revealed no details other than that the man was not a suspect.

Police said the bomb would have created a fireball that likely would have killed or wounded many people, making it the most serious bombing attempt in the United States since the Christmas Day incident aboard a commercial flight bound for Detroit. The investigation has focused on whether an organized group or a determined individual was responsible....

Joan Wallach Scott is an influential Princeton University historian whose poisonous brand of academic feminism sanctions Islamic misogyny in the name of cultural relativism. Her 2006 polemic, The Politics of the Veil, was an intellectually lazy attempt to shut down opponents of public veiling in France with broad accusations of racism, imperialism, and paranoia.

Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory interviewed Professor Scott this week on Muslim women’s “right to veil,” insisting “[i]t would be a pity for her voice to be left out of the debate” on the proposed burqa ban in France.  Scott’s morally vacuous contributions to the public conversation make her a supremely qualified recipient of The Naomi Wolf Award (aka, The Howler.) For those not familiar:

The Naomi Wolf Award recognizes the failure of feminist commentators to identify Muslim veils, particularly the burqa and the niqab, as powerful symbols of extremist ideology and instruments of subjugation.  Nominees will be judged on their use of the rhetoric of freedom and choice to justify these emblems of Islamic gender apartheid.

Joan Scott acknowledges that “there is no Quranic requirement that women wear these coverings.”  But like all apologists for the burqa and niqab, she pretends that those who veil are exercising religious freedom:

What’s wrong is that there’s no real attempt to find out why women wear these or to grant the idea that they may be making a choice; that they are not forced to do this, but find it a way of expressing their religious identity or religious conscience.

The full veil is not a mere fashion choice representing devotion to the Muslim faith. It is a reflection of women’s second-class status that travels with them wherever they go. It is a reminder to the wearer and all those who encounter her that she is subhuman, undeserving of fresh air, sunlight, and the ability to communicate effectively.

Under Sharia law, infidels may be persecuted, disfigured, or murdered. Where is the meaningful choice for women?

Choice is liberating. The burqa is not a choice.

Scott also contends that the burqa and niqab are not necessarily an assault on freedom and equality:

One can’t assume they know why a woman wears a veil or even that it signifies oppression.

…

They don’t take into account the many reasons women might decide to wear a veil — much of the testimony suggests women [in France] choose this; they are not forced. By assuming that there is only one reason women might wear a veil, this argument refuses to grant agency or religious conscience to women.

Just because these women live in Europe does not mean this tool of oppression magically transforms into an emblem of freedom and choice.  I wonder, has Professor Scott ever attempted to go about her daily business while entombed in a dehumanizing fabric crypt?  Women behind the veil are mummies who have yet to be embalmed.  It is not just their gender and sexuality that are erased, but the senses they use to interact with the world.

Should we drop our concerns simply because these women appear complicit in their own subordination?

Just in case you’re not fully on Team Burqa, Scott takes a moment to convince readers of the “deep racism about Muslims”:

I think [debating the veil] is a way of avoiding talking about the discrimination Muslims (men and women) face in Western societies, a way of indicating “our” superiority to “them,” of blaming “them” for the discrimination they suffer, a way of depicting “them” as less modern, less enlightened than “us.”

Discussions of stigmatizing the other might be red meat for the politically correct crowd, but back on Planet Morality, all ideologies are not equally deserving of respect.  Western societies are superior to those where Sharia law reigns supreme.  Any system of belief that celebrates misogyny with practices like female genital mutilation, polygamy, and stoning is inherently “less enlightened.”

Women shrouded in the burqa are walking advertisements of Islam’s loathing of women, non-Muslims, and Western ideals.  To use leftist parlance Joan Scott might understand, the burqa is hate speech.

But no matter the level of violence and misogyny, Scott believes all ideas are equally valid and righteous (as long as they aren’t part of the Zionist conspiracy.)  On a recent panel with Tariq Ramadan, Scott even refused to condemn the Islamic practice of stoning women who commit adultery, explaining that it is not for us to criticize or meddle in their religion.  In light of that moral depravity, it’s no surprise that Scott continues to make a case for the burqa.

And so, in recognition of Joan Scott’s obscene defense of a woman’s choice to be buried alive behind a veil that symbolizes the absence of choice for women, I hereby present her with her very first Naomi Wolf Award.

I expect it won’t be her last.

This past week, it is being reported that Guantanamo detainees being released are returning to terrorist activity in far greater numbers than had been expected.

In our attempt to take the high road, please other nations, and keep the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) happy we continue to set ourselves up for new attacks from the same old recycled terrorists.

Analysts hoped that jihadis going through “rehabilitation” in Saudi Arabia would make a difference. Well, it appears this plan was as effective as rehab has been for Amy Winehouse.

From FoxNews.com:

Addicott says part of the problem is the push to rehabilitate enemy combatants who can’t be rehabilitated.

For example, a “rehabilitation” center in Saudi Arabia that has become home to many released detainees claims it can turn around detainees’ radical beliefs in a matter of months. But two of its graduates, former Guantanamo detainees Ibrahim Sulayman Muhammad Arbaysh and Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, now lead Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — the Yemeni group that has claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner and is being linked to a recently foiled plot against key oil and security facilities in Saudi Arabia.

“That’s out of the playbook of Al Qaeda,” Addicott said. “They tell people, ‘If you’re captured, claim that your tortured. If that doesn’t work, if you have an opportunity to be rehabilitated, use that to get out. So many of them play this game and they know the buttons that they can push.”

There is no perfect solution, but there certainly is ample evidence of what isn’t working. As you’ve heard it said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Americans like to play by the rules, but the rules here are fuzzy. Is our moral obligation to the safety of our citizens and others around the world, or is it to please the ACLU?

Stephanie Hessler, former constitutional lawyer for the Senate Judiciary Committee, may have summed it up best, writing this back in Feb. 2009:

To close Guantánamo, there must be comprehensive legislation covering detainee trials, continued detention, and release. A few days after the election, the New York Times ran a full-page ACLU ad urging Obama to close Guantánamo “on day one, with the stroke of a pen.” If only reality were as simple as rhetoric.

No more going to rehab, baby.

NAIROBI, Kenya, March 24 (CDN) -- Islamic militants in Somalia tracked down an underground church leader who had previously escaped a kidnapping attempt and killed him last week, Christian sources said.

Islamic extremist al Shabaab rebels shot Madobe Abdi to death on March 15 at 9:30 a.m. in Mahaday village, 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Johwar. He had escaped an al Shabaab attempt to kidnap him on March 2.

Abdi's death adds to a growing number of Christians murdered by Islamic militants, but his was distinctive in that he was not a convert from Islam. An orphan, Abdi was raised as a Christian.

Sources said the militants prohibited his body from being buried, ordering that it be left to dogs as an example to other Christians. Al shabaab, which is fighting the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of President Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed, has embarked on a campaign to rid the country of all non-Muslims.

"The al Shabaab say, 'Leaving Abdi's body outside is a warning to all that a murtid [infidel] is a disgrace to Muslims,' hence creating fear to whoever would like to choose Christianity," said a source....

SAN'A, Yemen -- The U.S. al-Qaida suspect detained in Yemen had persuaded his guard to unshackle him so the two could pray together and then snatched his unattended gun and killed him during the suspect's failed escape attempt, senior security officials said Saturday.

Sharif Mobley, a 26-year-old American of Somali descent, had traveled to Yemen two years ago, ostensibly to study Arabic, and was recently arrested there in a sweep against al-Qaida.

Mobley made his bold escape attempt March 7 after being transferred from prison to a hospital in the capital, San'a, for medical treatment. He tried to shoot his way out of the hospital, killing one guard and seriously injuring another before being recaptured.

New details about the episode obtained by The Associated Press indicate Mobley had a level of training and cunning characteristic of the al-Qaida terror network....

Mobley grew up in Buena, New Jersey. His parents said he is not a terrorist, though a former friend said Mobley was becoming increasingly radical in his Muslim beliefs before he moved to Yemen. His mother last spoke to him in January.

(AP) -- CHICAGO - A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a civil lawsuit accusing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of responsibility for the alleged torture by U.S. forces of two Americans who worked for an Iraqi contracting firm.

U.S. District Judge Wayne R. Andersen's ruling did not say the two contractors had proven their claims, including that they were tortured after reporting alleged illegal activities by their company. But it did say they had alleged enough specific mistreatment to warrant hearing evidence of exactly what happened.

Andersen said his decision "represents a recognition that federal officials may not strip citizens of well settled constitutional protections against mistreatment simply because they are located in a tumultuous foreign setting."...

But this kind of court action, if it proceeds, will lead to deleterious consequences for American democracy in the future. Picture America as a banana republic in which every new President jails his opposition. It isn't all that far off from this.

In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have invited two distinguished guests to discuss the question: Is Hannah Arendt still relevant? We ask this in the context of whether Arendt’s definition of totalitarianism is still relevant and whether it can shed light on the conflict the West now faces.

Our guests today are:

Bernard Wasserstein, a professor of history whose are area of interest is Jewish history. He is currently teaching at the University of Chicago. In early 2009, he wrote a long and critical essay on Hannah Arendt that called her methods and arguments into question. He argued, among other things, that totalitarianism is not a useful analytical category, that Arendt relied in her writing on pro-Nazi sources and that she showed barely concealed hostility toward the Jewish people. His essay has evoked a big response both in Britain and the U.S.

and

David Satter, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London from 1976 to 1982, during the height of the Soviet totalitarian period and he is the author of Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which is being made into a documentary film. His most recent work is Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State.

FP: David Satter and Bernard Wasserstein, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Prof. Wasserstein, let me begin with you.

I think the best way to start would be for you to briefly lay out your position on Arendt and her relevance. Kindly also touch on your take on Arendt’s relationship with the Jewish people and, in turn, with her own Jewishness.

Wasserstein: Hannah Arendt is one of those twentieth-century figures, like Edward Said or Michel Foucault, who have acquired absurdly inflated reputations on the basis of work in which lack of intellectual rigor is concealed behind barrage-balloons of overblown rhetoric.

My essay, published in the Times Literary Supplement in October 2009, was concerned specifically with puncturing Arendt’s claim to be taken seriously as a historian. I pointed out that the concept of totalitarianism, basic to the interpretation of Nazism and Communism that she presented in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, is now treated with reserve by most professional historians.

I discussed her treatment of imperialism, especially British imperialism, and her absurd attempt to equate that with totalitarianism. And I focused on her analysis of modern Jewish history, showing that this was heavily derived from Nazi historians. From these and from the German academic environment in which her outlook was formed Arendt drew her contemptuous attitude towards Jews, an attitude that was basic to her interpretation of modern history and that infected her relationship to everything Jewish, including Zionism and Israel.

FP: David Satter?

Satter: I agree with Bernard that Arendt was no historian. The one thing that she does not explain about totalitarianism in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” are its origins. Her description of the roots of Nazism is used mechanically and completely unconvincingly to describe the rise of Stalinism. And her explanation of the rise of Nazism neglects the role of the Western spiritual crisis in making possible the rise of both communist and Nazi ideology. In fact, it was the victory of communism – in which for the first time the moral edifice of 2500 years of Western civilization was totally rejected – that contributed to the victory of Nazism rather than the other way around. This is a reality that Arendt muddles completely.

Nonetheless, I believe that Arendt’s contribution is absolutely seminal because she explains as no one else had not the origins of totalitarianism but its fundamental nature. Totalitarianism existed not just in Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany but in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where I witnessed it first hand. Briefly put, it consists of the attempt to create reality by force. This was brilliantly explained by Arendt in the concluding chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Ideology and Terror.”

It can be argued that Arendt was guilty of oversimplification and revisionists always point to the extent to which Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany were not totalitarian. But Arendt sought to characterize the essence of the phenomenon and to describe its basic structure. This is something that she achieved and, as an analytical model that can be applied not only to the past but to fanatical Islamic movements and doomsday cults it remains highly relevant today.

Regarding Arendt’s attitude toward Jews and anti-Semitism, I think that Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, was, in part, correct when he wrote that Arendt, in her work, did not show a love for her people. But her purpose was to describe reality not to praise her own origins. I believe that she felt that her strictures against her own people (her comments about Germans were considerably more devastating) were a demonstration of love in that they showed that a Jew could value the truth above clan loyalty and, as such, could be fully developed as a human being. Whether in fact she always correctly identified the truth is another matter. Her description of the role of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) in Eichmann in Jerusalem is not so much untrue as lacking an appreciation of the excruciating circumstances in which the Jewish leaders found themselves. But I think this attests to Arendt’s uncompromising personality rather than to anti-Semitism. Insofar as it reflected a demand for almost superhuman behavior from the Jewish leaders, one could argue that it also showed a kind of love.

Wasserstein: David Satter has started off a number of hares (the nature of Communism, Islamism, etc.) that I shall not pursue here. Let’s keep the focus on Arendt and totalitarianism and Arendt and the Jews.

Let’s deal first of all with totalitarianism and then proceed to Arendt and the Jews at a later stage:

One of the problems with Arendt’s discussion of totalitarianism is that she nowhere defines this elusive and slippery term. Without a definition it is hardly worth discussing or taking seriously. I do not think that there is, in fact, a definition that would turn this word into a methodologically helpful concept. It is, in fact, a tired old cold-war slogan, not an intellectually respectable or useful heuristic device.

I do not find the final chapter of “Origins” nearly as persuasive as Satter. I would indeed maintain, as he suggests, that she was guilty of gross over-simplification. He defends her as an essentializer. But that is precisely the problem. She discounted the role of contingency in history and tried to fit everything into one overall pattern to which she claimed to have discovered the key. Nor did she succeed even there in the sense that Marx and Marxists (or, to take another example, Christians), certainly did so. That is to say, they at least succeeded in creating an internally coherent system of thought and interpretation of social reality. One may argue against it on empirical and other grounds. I would certainly do so very strongly.

But Marxism (like Christianity) at least has the virtue of internal consistency. Of course, that is also its vice: it sees the whole of reality within a supposedly unifying theory. Isaiah Berlin, in his life’s work exposed the fallacy and the dangers of such a view of the world. Arendt attempted something similar to Marx, though she was certainly no Marxist – this notwithstanding her celebration of Rosa Luxemburg and the workers’ councils movement of 1918-19 in Germany and Italy – which she falsely equated with the phenomenon of that name in Hungary in 1956.

The reasons for her mouthing of certain Marxist slogans probably had something to do with her relationship to her Communist husband – from whom she derived many of her ideas – and perhaps explains her attractiveness to some neo-Marxists today … but that is another hare that I shall not pursue here.

Where the Marxists produced a theory that is wholly self-contained and sustainable within its own logic which, like Christianity, claims universal and total validity, Arendt produced nothing comparable.  Her supposed theoretical framework (at any rate as presented in the “Origins”) is, in fact, a mishmash. There is no ‘analytical model’ here worthy of the name. As Berlin put it: ‘She produces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical thought. It is all a stream of metaphysical associations.’

There is a lot of sound and fury, most of it hollow rhetoric, but no sustained argument worthy of serious attention.  The closest parallel in modern thought is, in my view, L. Ron Hubbard, another thinker who claims to have discovered the key to a totalizing universally valid idea but whose work, like Arendt’s, is a hotchpotch of slogans and semi-digested pap that, again like Arendt, Said, and Foucault, impresses weak minds, especially on the old/new left in search of intellectual crutch on which to lean because they are tired of thinking for themselves. I am surprised, to put it mildly, to find Satter in such company.

Satter: I think Arendt made three important contributions to our understanding of totalitarianism. First, she described the totalitarian movement as a series of concentric circles spreading out from an ideological core. Second, she defined ideology as the logic of an idea pursued without reference to external reality and, finally, she defined totalitarianism itself as the combination of ideology and terror, in effect, the use of total terror to remake reality.

Regarding the first point, she identified that lack of moral grounding and escalation of cynicism that allowed fanatical movements to attract followers and sympathizers among wide segments of the population. The followers provided the ideological hard core with vital support and made it seem more reasonable than it really was. In fact, the ability of an ideological hard core to attract persons who share their values but may balk at their methods is an important reason why small groups of fanatics can pose such a lethal threat.

In her discussion of ideology, Arendt defines a word that is widely used but little understood. The search for truth is a dialogic process in which a person must always be ready to test his conclusions against a changing reality. Ideology interrupts this process. It takes a single proposition and applies it to all aspects of reality. It is, as Arendt wrote, the “logic of an idea” but a logic which is never tested against empirical reality but, on the contrary, re-envisages reality in accordance with its own internal requirements.

With Arendt’s definition in mind, we are equipped to understand the monomaniacal core of modern ideologies, their contempt for reality and emancipation from, “all the plausibilities of the world,” (Burke). We can also see the ways in which ideological thinking pervades political discourse even in a democratic society.

Finally, Arendt defines totalitarianism as the combination of ideology and terror. Observers have often been mystified by the apparent irrationality of totalitarian behavior, the decision of Hitler to destroy the European Jews instead of putting them to work on behalf of the German war machine, the decision of Stalin to destroy the Soviet officer corps on the eve of war or annihilate the country’s most productive farmers. But the objectives of a totalitarian regime, as Arendt shows, have nothing to do with practical concerns but only the realization of a deranged ideology. Since reality inevitably resists the imposition of irreality, this can only be accomplished through the use of massive force.

Arendt does not enunciate a new universal theory. She is a political theorist concerned to describe and illuminate a new political phenomenon. Did she do this accurately? At this point, I need to refer to my personal experience. I wrote a graduate thesis at Oxford on Hannah Arendt and then was posted to Moscow as the correspondent of the Financial Times. As a result, I had the rare opportunity of studying a theory and being able, immediately afterward, to test its conclusions against reality. What I witnessed in the Soviet Union was an entire society organized to act out a view of reality contained in Marxist-Leninist ideology, including a population that supposedly demonstrated voluntary unanimity, rulers who were supposedly infallible and a guiding ideology that was as inarguable as the axioms of geometry. All of this was supported by mirage-like pseudo democratic institutions: courts to which there was no recourse, trade unions that were part of management and a parliament that always supported the government. It goes almost without saying that such a system of massive and continuous lying could only be held together by force.

Wasserstein: I have no substantial quarrel with Satter’s description of Arendt’s propositions. What I reject is his evaluation of them. Arendt’s ‘totalitarianism’ is primarily an attempt to explain Nazism, not Communism, as she herself admitted. Yet she brings in lengthy discussion of both Communism and Imperialism in an effort to conflate all three within what appears to be her understanding of the totalitarian phenomenon.  The effort at conflation is central to her approach and indeed the chief reason for its attractiveness to such a varied and contradictory set of constituencies. But her attempt falls flat, however much rhetorical huffing and puffing she funnels into it.  Lawrence, Rhodes, and Disraeli, to whom she devotes considerable space in the first section of her magnum opus, were no doubt exemplary imperialists but to see their thought or historical role as related in any way to totalitarianism is far-fetched. Arendt does not in fact argue this: she rather lets it be understood implicitly – which is why her work has such an uncanny attraction for anti-imperialists of various hues. As for the attempt to conflate Nazism and Communism, allow me to refer to what I wrote in my recent book “Barbarism and Civilization:

“Both Nazism and Communism became deeply attractive belief systems for millions. Both in their day offered emotional comfort and to the disoriented, reassurance to the bewildered.  Both demanded surrender of self to the mass, offering in return the comfort of suspension of individual moral responsibility. Both dispensed with the rule of law, elevated the secret police to the highest authority in the land, constructed vast systems of slave labour, and killed millions of their subjects. Yet in the supreme test of total war both sustained the morale and adhesion of their followers at least as well as the liberal democracies. Both succumbed on battlefields of their own choosing: Nazism by defeat in war, Communism by its failure to create a classless society free from material want. Yet so long as they could plausibly claim success, most of their subjects willingly did as they were told.

“We should not, however, fall into the common error trap of imputing a false parallelism between the two great warrior ideologies. Nazism, for all its revolutionary jargon, represented in its essence a reaction against the nineteenth-century faith in human progress. It was an attempt to seize history by the collar and frog-march it in a direction determined primarily by the selfish interests and obsessive beliefs of those in power. From the outset it was an anti-intellectual movement, offering its adherents the spurious solidarity of the street gang and the prospective enjoyment of stolen booty.

“Communism, by contrast, was a sophisticated and internally coherent framework of thought. It was not, as it is sometimes portrayed, a manic delusion of the intelligentsia but rather a modern transformation of the utopian chiliasm of the most enlightened elements in European thought since the seventeenth century. As distinct from the cave-man morality of Nazism and from the individualist ethic of liberalism, Communism sought to achieve a higher collective good that derived from Rousseau’s concept of the general will and Gerard Winstanley’s idea of the common weal. The source of its special appeal to several generations of European intellectuals, perhaps also one of the reasons why it survived in power so much longer than Nazism, was its (ultimately self-falsified) claim, derived from Marx, to be able to discern and to accelerate the underlying motive forces of history. That both Communism and Nazism developed into mechanisms of brute force and thuggery should not blind us to their distinctive origins and aspirations.”

Nor is the view that Soviet Russian Communism or Nazism (or for that matter British or French imperialisms) were held together only by force borne out by historical research. In the case of Nazism (let us again recall, Arendt’s primary concern), Ian Kershaw and others have shown the very broad degree of support that the regime maintained among the German people at least until Stalingrad and the continuing general acquiescence that it retained until near the end of the war. As for the USSR, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s work has shown how the rapid social mobility that Communism offered to the incipient ‘New Class’ helped create a not inconsiderable constituency of willing collaborators who profited from Stalinism and even more perhaps from post-Stalinism. Imperialism too depended on what Gallagher and Robinson in their “Africa and the Victorians” termed the “collaborative equation” between rulers and important sections of the ruled. To see these systems, as Arendt did, simply as regimes of blind terror is to fall into an ahistorical trap.

Which brings us to Arendt and the Jews. The passages in “Origins” on anti-semitism and its supposed origins are absolutely central to Arendt’s argument about totalitarianism – though that very purported centrality in itself robs her argument of any validity since anti-semitism patently had very different valencies and functions in the Nazi, Soviet and imperial contexts. I should be interested to hear how Satter proposes to defend Arendt’s position here. Perhaps he does not wish to come to her defence on this – but in a sense he must, since this if he gives way here he dismantles a flying buttress on which the entire edifice of the “Origins” depends. I therefore await his response with interest.

Satter: Let’s consider Arendt’s attitude toward the Jews. This attitude is expressed principally in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” where the relation of the Jews to the nation state is invoked as an important factor in the rise of totalitarianism and in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” where Arendt’s discussion of the role of the Jewish councils under the Nazis led to accusations that she was unfair to her own people and to charges that she was a “self-hating Jew.”

In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt argued that because of the Jews’ identification with the state, every social group that came into conflict with the state became anti-semitic and the anti-semitic parties became murderous because, unlike other parties, their goal from the start was not to change the state but rather to take it over and dominate it. Arendt makes this argument at considerable length and it does shed some light but I have never found it convincing as an explanation for the origins of Nazism much less communism. Arendt herself acknowledged that the title “The Origins of Totalitarianism” was inappropriate and that in her historical sketches of anti-semitism and imperialism she was describing the elements that crystallized into totalitarianism rather than its causes. Arendt, however, also analyzes totalitarianism and describes it. It is this part of her theory that is most valuable.

Because it placed European Jewry in a social context and did not view Jews purely as victims, Arendt’s discussion of anti-semitism in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” led to unease about Arendt’s attitude toward her own people which was greatly increased by her treatment of the Jewish councils in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Oddly, Arendt’s understanding of the impossible moral choices that are forced on the victims under totalitarianism does not always lead her to view with informed sympathy the choices faced by those victims who, I would like to believe, should have been closest to her.

In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt describes the roles of the Jewish councils and the Jewish police in facilitating the deportations of Jews to the death camps. She argues, as did Bruno Bettelheim in a different context, that non-cooperation and armed resistance would have saved many more lives and at least would have forced the Nazis to pay a price for their barbarity. But her solution begs the question that her analysis describes. In a situation of total terror and robotically organized masses, it is only rare exceptions who have the will to resist. And this applies not just to Jews but to any victims of totalitarianism who are deprived of any means of collective action that is not outright suicidal.

In this respect, however, it does not pay to accuse Arendt of anti-semitism or self-hatred as some have done. Such a charge suggests that Jewish people cannot be self critical and do not seek to be and clearly indicates that, since there are self-hating Jews, there is something to hate. In the early 19^th century, the Russian writer Pyotr Chaadaev had this to say about the Russian people:

We are an exception among people. We belong to those who are not an integral part of humanity but exist only to teach the world some type of great lesson… Alone in the world, we gave the world nothing and have taken nothing, we have in no way contributed to the progress of human reason and everything that came to use as a result of this progress, we distorted. (First Philosophical Letter)

Was Chaadaev (who was thrown in a mental hospital for his writing) a self-hating Russian? Or did he want more for his people than they themselves envisaged? With regard to Arendt and the accusations against her, I think that her arguments about the Jewish councils, with which I don’t agree, are nonetheless a valuable contribution. They also convey the implicit message that Jews should be open to the widest possible discussion no less than anyone else. The choice is clear. If we wish for the world to believe in the positive contribution to humanity of the Jewish spirit we must first of all believe in ourselves.

FP: Well gentlemen, we have entered our final round.  Concluding thoughts please.

Wasserstein: I did not accuse Arendt of being ‘a self-hating Jew.’ That term is not part of my vocabulary. What I do, however, maintain is that when she refers to Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor at the Eichmann trial as ‘a typical Galician Jew, very unsympathetic’ or when she enthusiastically adopts the virulent vocabulary and imagery of anti-Semites like Edouard Drumont and J. A. Hobson in denouncing Jewish capitalists, it is surely a rather strained reading that sees such borrowings as evidence of Arendt’s desire to appeal to the better instincts of her fellow-Jews. A more plausible interpretation is that Arendt herself internalized the attitudes of many of the anti-Semitic writers, including the Nazi historians on whom she relied.

Arendt’s interpretation of modern Jewish history rests on crude reductionism, on a primitive taxonomy of Jewish society, on a simplistic and exaggerated ascription of social roles to Jews as a collectivity, and on the lumping attribution to certain groups of Jews such as the wealthy ‘parasites’ in the Third Republic of a coherence and semi-criminal agency that Arendt was later, with equal ahistoricity, to pin on the Judenräte in occupied Europe. Much of this she got directly from her Nazi and other anti-semitic authorities.

As regards the question of Jewish resistance and the ‘Jewish Councils’ during World War II, it seems Satter and I agree that Arendt’s wild pronouncements on this issue were both ahistorical and morally misconceived. The question remains, therefore, why a writer with such a perverse view of the role of Jews in the world should be regarded as any sort of authority on modern Jewish history.

Satter: Ultimately, Arendt is not regarded as an authority on modern Jewish history although she wrote a great deal on this subject. She is seen as a profound investigator of totalitarianism and it on this that her reputation depends.

I think that Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism as the combination of ideology and terror and her understanding of ideology as a substitute for empirical reality is very important to us today. The totalitarian worldview is deeply counter-intuitive. There is a tendency to treat it as a joke and to underestimate its murderous potential. We therefore need to understand, as Arendt shows us, that what is at stake is an attempt to destroy what is human under the overwhelming pressure of a deluded view of reality.

Arendt’s work, along with that of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Czeslaw Milosz, and many others helped to turn the West against communism and against the Soviet Union. But this should be seen as their great achievement. We excluded a consideration of Islamic fanaticism from our discussion but the relevance of Arendt’s definitions for an understanding of radical Islam is striking. A man made ideology is again trying to impose itself with the help of unlimited terror. The West can and will make many mistakes in its struggle with totalitarianism but we have the means to understand what it is that threatens us. For this, we owe a great deal – despite its shortcomings – to the work of Hannah Arendt.

FP: David Satter and Bernard Wasserstein, our time is up, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.